The mother of all driver shortages

This was pulled from Heavy Duty Trucking Magazine Online



By 2012, the industry will be looking at shortage of 400,000 drivers, according to Eric Starks, president of FTR Associates.

The issues the industry has been facing for years have not gone away, including an aging driver population and a minimum driving age that precludes recruiting recent high-school graduates.

Add to that a shrunken recruiting pipeline. During the recession, fleets slashed recruiting, human resources and training departments. Driving schools closed down. As a result, Starks says the industry can hire only about 100,000 drivers into the market each quarter. It's like a funnel. Even if you have a million people that want to be truckers, only a certain number can fit through that hiring/processing funnel at a time.

Then there's the regulatory issue. CSA 2010 will result in drivers who appear to be unsafe getting pushed out of the system as carriers refuse to hire them. Likely changes to hours of service regulations could affect productivity by 6 percent, FTR estimates ­- meaning an extra 150,000 trucks, and drivers, needed to move the same amount of freight.

Image via WikipediaCrackdowns in documentation required to get a commercial driver's license, designed to address the hot-button issue of illegal immigrants, also will pull a significant number of drivers out of the available labor pool. Some believe this could have an even more chilling effect than hours of service changes.

Further complicating the driver situation are attacks by the federal government and state agencies on the use of independent contractors. Although these efforts aim to crack down on the improper "misclassification" of employees as contractors to avoid taxes, many legitimate owner-operators could be affected. The Obama administration has upped its efforts to ferret out such "misclassification." And one bill has been introduced in Washington, D.C., that would remove the Section 530 "safe harbor" provision much of the trucking industry relies on to justify its use of independent contractors.

http://www.truckinginfo.com/washington-report/news-detail.asp?news_id=72554&news_category_id=84

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